Stable Audio 2, Terraform Industries and Bigger Chips – Live and Learn #39

✨ Quote ✨

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

– Daniel J. Boorstin

🖇️ Links 🖇️

Terraform Industries by S3. This is a short documentary about a company that is aiming to build a machine that can pull CO2 out of the air and synthesize it into natural gas at lower prices than extracting it from the ground. If they succeed with their mission humans can solve climate change without shifting the entire industry away from hydrocarbons. We just change the source and cycle the carbon that is in the air back into our machines to power our world. There is also a First Principles podcast episode on Terraform Industries which I recommend listening to as well. Technology like this seems like magic to me, and yet I firmly believe that ideas like this are only the beginning and we will see much more crazy stuff soon enough being built for real.

But what is a GPT? by 3b1b. 3Blue1Brown is one of my favorite channels on YT of all time and when I stumbled upon this latest release of his and saw that it dives into what LLMs like ChatGPT are and what they are doing under the hood, I was super excited. This video is a great introduction to the topic and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how any of these models work in more detail.

You Are A Maker by Open Sauce. This short talk by Adam Savage, famous from Myth Busters and in the "creator" community at large, is about how insane it is that we can create things with today's precision. He dives into the history of how this came to be, explaining and showing off some of the tools that make precision possible in the first place. And how it is all about human collaboration in the end. All of these crazy technological advances that we see happening in the world are directly traceable to inventions like Gauge blocks that he is describing in this talk.

Neuralink Patient 1 Updates. This is a question-and-answer session with the first Neuralink patient, Noland Arbaugh. To me, it's insane how happy and excited he is about this device. This is one of the most awe-inspiring things I have seen in a long time. The team at Neuralink gives serious hope to paraplegics and the enthusiasm of Noland Arbaugh is infectious. He believes that someday, he might be able to walk again because of the work that Neuralink is doing. Not to mention that they are giving him telepathy-like superpowers in the meantime. Crazy stuff.

Garment 3D Gen by Meta. This is a project that can generate interactable 3D models of clothing from a single image. Things like this will make it easier for people to try on clothes online and essentially give something like Amazon an insanely easy way to create something like a virtual fitting room. And even crazier their 3D models are good enough that they can fit them onto 3D body shapes too. Seriously the demos in this paper are insane and completely blow my mind.

Stable Audio 2 by Stability AI. Stability AI has improved on their Stable Audio model and released version two which makes the audio quality much better and can generate musical ideas that are more coherent and interesting. It can generate pieces of music up to three minutes in length. The time when everybody can have infinite music, generated to their liking simply by typing a text describing the music is here. You can try it out at stableaudio.com.

Gigantic Chips by Cerebras. Cerebras is building a new style of chip that is giant. They are pushing the scale of chips so that they have more transistors connected on the same piece of silicon, which enables much faster training of much bigger AI models. This is important because going forward using something like this, the new models from giants like OpenAI can become even bigger. Right now Nvidia is still dominant in the space but it's cool to see that there are other players there trying out different approaches too.

🌌 Traveling 🌌

I've been working a little bit on writing more travel blog-like stories over the past few weeks and you can find the result at /pages/travel on this site.

Right now I am enjoying my time in a small hostel in the middle of Guadeloupe and taking things a bit slower: not moving as much, reading more, and spending time with the people here.

🎶 Song 🎶

A Few Variables by Alfa Mist

This time the "song" is really a whole show from Alfa Mist. It's an experience that you have to watch because the visuals match the music and it's a beautiful artwork as a whole.

Youtube

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That's all for this time. I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!

Have ideas for improving it? As always please let me know.

Cheers,

– Rico